Booming again
‘ White gold’ helps transform former Colorado mining town
FRISCO, Colo. — Visitors flock to this old silver-mining community near the Continental Divide to ski, hike and enjoy the unparalleled scenery.
The location doesn’t get much better. Just off Interstate 70, Frisco sits within a few minutes’ drive of four major ski resorts: Copper Mountain, Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin. But if not for the “white gold” of ski tourism, Frisco might be a ghost town instead of a snow-lovers’ paradise.
After a brief heyday in the late 19th century, Frisco nearly disappeared altogether when the mines played out. The population fell to 18 during the Great Depression. Even the electricity and phone companies pulled out.
But the town hung on, and when the skiing boom hit in the 1960s, Frisco boomed, too.
The town’s salvation was unfortunate, perhaps, for Casper and his ghostly pals, but good news for the more animate visitors and residents. About 3,000 people now call Frisco home.
Grandly dubbed “The Main Street of the Rockies,” the town’s central avenue is lined with shops, restaurants and taverns in cute, oldfashioned, mountain-town storefronts. Most of those buildings, however, have been constructed since the 1960s.
A nice taste of authentic Frisco history is still available on Main Street at the town’s interesting museum and historical park. The museum is located in the town’s old schoolhouse, one of the few historic buildings that remain on its original site. The structure was built in 1899 as a tavern but never opened and was sold to the school district in 1901. A picturesque bell tower was added in 1910 (as if the town needed any more adornment).
The museum contains a number of interesting exhibits, including a delightful scale model of Frisco as it appeared during the height of the mining boom. Bring a quarter and you can make the model railroad chug through the diorama.
As the town revived decades after its Depression-era nadir, local citizens had the foresight to save the school and to move several historic buildings to the museum grounds as development threatened the old structures. Today, 11 historic buildings, dating from 1860 to 1943, are located at the historical park, each containing exhibits detailing some aspect of Frisco history. The buildings include the original town jail, several cabins and early homes and a log chapel.
Although snow is king in Frisco, tourists don’t all melt away in the spring.
In warmer months, the town is actually a boating center. Frisco sits on a small bay on Dillon Reservoir, built in 1961 to sate Denver’s growing thirst. (An exhibit at the museum tells the story of the reservoir’s construction, including how the entire town of Dillon had to be moved to higher ground.)
Boaters can explore 25 miles of shoreline, all with a